This article reviews the proximate factors of human welfare since 1870 by discussing two strands of the economic history literature and identifying various key areas for further research. The first strand focuses on level accounting studies that attribute between-country economic inequality to...

Could we measure the contribution of women to the economy in the pre-industrial world? Yes, it is possible, particularly in the context of Russia. By analyzing archival sources, we can not only measure their contribution to the economy but also observe how the Russian Empire evolved into a more...

Medieval and Early-Modern business correspondence between European companies constitutes a rich source of economic, business, and trade information in that the writing of letters was the very instrument through which merchants ordered and organized the shipments of goods, and performed financial...

Fifty years ago, China sent more than 16 million urban youths aged 16–19 to rural villages to work and they spent between 1 and 10 years there. This is known as the 'sent-down youth' (SDY) program. This paper examines how this internal migration impacted rural economic development in the...

A sketch of the International Monetary Fund’s 70-year history reveals an institution that has reinvented itself over time along multiple dimensions. This history is primarily consistent with a “demand driven” theory of institutional change, as the needs of its clients and the type of...

Ebola and plague share several characteristics, even though the second and third plague epidemics dwarfed the 2014-15 Ebola outbreak in terms of mortality. This essay reviews the mortality due to the two diseases and their lethality; the spatial and socioeconomic dimensions of plague mortality;...

This paper analyzes the determinants of the labor-capital split in national income for 20 countries since the late 1800s. Our main identification strategy focuses on unique historical quasi-experimental events: i) the introduction of universal suffrage, ii) close election wins of left-wing...

The independent German research organization "Institute for Banking and Financial History" was founded in 1969 as "Institute for historical research on banks". Its origins were a small institution which were not much more than a One-Man-Show by the banking journalist Erich Achterberg. With the...

This paper surveys the recent social science literature on religion in economic history, covering both socioeconomic causes and consequences of religion. Following the rapidly growing literature, it focuses on the three main monotheisms—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—and on the period up...

This paper analyzes the determinants of the labor-capital split in national income for 20 countries since the late 1800s. Our main identification strategy focuses on unique historical quasi-experimental events: i) the introduction of universal suffrage, ii) close election wins of left-wing...